surrender
by thesocketpuppet
Summary: Garnet likes Pearl, whatever stupid things Pearl does. Pearl doesn't think their mutual attraction is a good idea – just look at what happened with Sardonyx. The best defense (for the good them both) is to play it dumb, especially now that that they're back on better terms.


**Pairing:** PearlNet (Pearl x Garnet)

 **Rating:** T / K+

 **Length:** Around 4k words

One shot, canonverse

 **Summary:** Garnet likes Pearl, whatever stupid things Pearl does. Pearl doesn't think their mutual attraction is a good idea – just look at what happened with Sardonyx. The best defense (for the good them both) is to play it dumb, especially now that that they're back on better terms.

Very special thanks to redscarfterezi for the beta. (This wouldn't have gone up without you!)

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 **Chore Wheel Says Pearl**

From a distance, Garnet watches Pearl set up breakfast. Having recently learned that human communication devices now have voice-operated assistants and a primitive information network, Pearl has taken to cooking more frequently in the morning. Garnet has to chuckle a bit at Pearl's simple happiness at having a sort of little helper – a helper called "Siri" who reads out ingredients and methods and plays videos of the correct cooking technique.

"They're finally catching on," she'd said excitedly when Connie showed her what Steven's smartphone could do (Steven didn't use the function at all.) Amethyst had rolled her eyes at Pearl's excitement. And as for Garnet, she breathed a little easier now that things were better between them. Nowhere near as good as before, but better.

Garnet cuts off that trail of thought, watching Pearl from her perch at the top of the stairs. She watches through the morning sunlight filtering through the roof and the tiny dustmites that are caught in the spotlight, through the morning cries of seagulls, through the occasional clattering of a pot or a pan, the sizzle of fire. All is right in the Quartz-Universe household. Even the stray enemy-turned-bathroom-resident can't ruin the smell of… asparagus? Yep. Sauteed asparagus and bacon and hash browns.

The computerized voice rings out a moment later: "Very Good!"

"Yes, Siri, not a bad first attempt if I do say so myself… though I wonder if the hash browns could be more crispy. We can conduct an experiment tomorrow."

"Wouldn't Steven get sick of eating hash browns if he ate 'em day after day?"

Pearl jumps at her voice, which makes Garnet sigh.

"Good morning," she says, turning to face Garnet. "I… what are you doing upstairs?" She's careful not to make her voice too loud, Garnet notices.

"Creepily watching Steven at night like you do," she says. Pearl doesn't rise to the jibe.

"He doesn't like that," she says instead, turning away to set the table for one.

Garnet groans. She walks down the stairs, looking for anything to help with.

"It's just a table for one," Pearl says, setting the spoon and fork down. There really isn't anything for Garnet to do. "Or did you need something from me?"

Garnet thinks fast. "We could do the groceries."

"I can do that," Pearl replies. She looks up to Steven's room, where the boy's still asleep. "I wonder if he's still tired."

And with that, Garnet's all out of steam this morning. "I'll go check," Pearl says, walking past her.

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The "new and improved" drill needs more parts – parts only found in old Gem-controlled Spires. Garnet's Eye finds what has to be found. They're warped to the mission, whatever gem monsters they must fight are poofed, they find what they're looking for, and they walk back home. There's no difference to be seen on the outside: they always win, and Steven is still young enough to be happy after a mission. He tells Peridot all he knows about the gem monsters, what they look like, and everyday Peridot cracks the world open for him and Amethyst both. Garnet's mind filters through some possibilities of learning some very dangerous things, but doesn't go too far; that would be an invasion of their privacy.

Then again, Peridot knows very little that Garnet and Pearl don't know.

It feels like a giant puzzle. The Crystal Gems hold one piece of Gem history. Peridot knows only the here-and-now, but not the events that connected _now_ from the past.

Pearl herself has been flawless, performance-wise, in all the missions. The pantry is stocked. Cooking with Siri & Pearl are shown to a live audience every 7 in the morning, on the dot, and the rest of the day goes to chores and the drill. The laundry is sorted, Steven's room is spotless, and the Cluster's days are numbered, or so Steven says.

Pearl's trying too hard. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's annoying, sometimes it's exasperating. And always, Garnet wishes she knew what to say. Garnet might be strong – she might have future vision – but against this – affection, or attraction, or whatever anyone wants to call it, there is nothing in her arsenal. Everyday, it creeps up on her, vanquishing any residual anger over being lied to. The harder Garnet tries to control herself by being angry about it, the more she wants to forgive Pearl and just let herself ask Pearl out.

(The truth is that Garnet's more frightened over being wanted for being strong than for being herself. But every day that Pearl proves her wrong makes it easy to forget that she's been used that way.)

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The next time Pearl goes for groceries, Garnet walks out with her, not asking for permission.

"Is there something we have to do today?"

"Nope, just walking out with you 'cos the beach house is scheduled for a meteor strike later tonight."

Pearl doesn't laugh her nervous laugh, or punch Garnet's arm over the lame joke, as she might have done a long time ago. "That's a joke, right," she says, "Because if it were true, you'd be getting everyone out." And there the joke went, death by explanation. Pearl makes a great joke-killer. A serial joke-killer. She could run over the Master of Comedy with her hopeless need to spell everything out.

They walk on in silence. Not for the first time, Garnet misses having Pearl's arm on hers.

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 **Tipping Point**

Something's off with Garnet. It might be all in Pearl's head, but it feels almost as though Garnet is checking on her progress. Progress with… standing on her own two feet. That's what Garnet asked for. Pearl's doing it.

It's a terrible temptation to walk next to Garnet, especially now that they can't (won't) fuse. She refuses to give in every time, is annoyed with Garnet when she asks to be with her. Pearl has long wondered about the binary nature of fusion: you fuse temporarily in a crisis, and permanently when in love. What goes in between zero and one? There's no scale, no spectrum, or if there is, she's lost all sense of it.

Relationships take work. Work takes time. How much time cannot be quantified, even if she's tried to bottle it up in an equation in the past. The farthest she's gone is a tipping point: a point in time when you realize there is no going back with what you feel. Relationships are full of tipping points that she can't graph: both partners have separate tipping points for realizing when they're in love, and when they realize that the other loves them. This is as far as Pearl comprehends. With this distance between them, far from the gravity of feeling, she can think up of these silly ideas.

And as for the equation between her and Garnet – the attraction she knows they both felt for each other long before the fallout with Sardonyx – this attraction was and is a bad idea. Garnet _knows_ that, but she looks at Pearl anyway. Pearl doesn't understand why Garnet would pursue any interest in another gem, especially not the one that last lied to her for a bit of love.

 _It's not a good idea_ , Pearl reminds herself, keeping her distance, passing her tests.

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 **Dinner at the Barn**

That being said, there are times when the rift between them slams shut, when it feels like old times. Like when Garnet patted her earlier that afternoon after the robolympics. That had been nice, Pearl thinks, quite unguarded of her to be so happy. She's surprised it feels this…good.

She makes sure to stay away now that it's late in the afternoon, resting by herself under a tree, pretending to fiddle with something. Amethyst and Garnet are busy setting up dinner, anyway (Pearl would have objected, but they pointed out that she needed a little rest), leaving her with some time to think.

Her happiness greets her like an old friend, bringing out the parts of her that aren't so terrible. The fight had been oddly satisfying. She's no stranger to having to prove herself; and for a change, this particular challenge doesn't leave her feeling as doubtful as they usually do. She isn't sure what's changed. She isn't sure if this means she's forgiven (of course not, nothing's ever so simple, why should a pat on the head mean something? It's a spirit-of-the-moment thing, she knows.)

"You were really good out there," Garnet says, surprising her. She yelps and turns to see Garnet, who sits next to her.

Pearl tries not to fidget. She has to answer something. Something appropriate. "I try," she says.

"You don't have to try so – so hard, all the time."

And, caught in surprise that Garnet would say that, Pearl answers more honestly than she would (later) like: "But, I do. It's what's kept us alive. Constant vigilance. I can't catch myself off guard."

"You're not your own worst enemy, y'know."

Pearl catches the light tone in Garnet's voice. She's half-joking, half-serious. Pearl never knows what the right thing is to say when humans or gems speak like that. Commands are easier to understand. She shuffles around, pokes around some scattered parts left lying around. She had placed them there to afford herself some quiet, but Garnet came and sat anyway.

 _She's trying to comfort you,_ Pearl thinks to herself, after some careful analysis of tone. The correct thing to do would be to return the comfort, say that Garnet's doing a good job. A gentle joke would do the trick.

"You're not about to tell me that I don't have to be alone to be strong, are you?"

"Well, you beat me to it."

That was the right thing to say, Pearl thinks.

"I already know that," Pearl says, quite proud of herself now.

"Yes Pearl, you're the All-Knowing Gem, aren't you?"

"I am indeed," Pearl says smugly. She knows that Garnet is being facetious, but what Garnet doesn't know is that she's in on the joke.

She finishes with a slight bow of her head, before getting up to check on Steven and Amethyst.

She can hear Garnet chuckle before following after her.

Situation resolved. Situation defused. Incremental progress.

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 **Before We Danced**

Between the two of them, Pearl had always been the one to seek out small touches. Now that she does not, the lack of it is stark - a clear contrast between "before Sardonyx" and after. Trust takes time. Pearl knows. Garnet knows. And Garnet knows that she has to be the one to say it's okay. And yet for all her steps towards Pearl, all the times she's watched and felt, she hasn't close the gap between them. She clenches her jaw, annoyed at herself. She tosses a ball, catches it, spends the whole afternoon unhelpfully watching the others build the drill. She should be doing something. She should say something. The time is coming to meet the Cluster. She ends up punching a hole in the wall.

"It's the cows," she says, when the team looks at her. "I've got mad cow disease. It's catching."

"That's not how mad cow works," Steven says, but Garnet shushes him. "Magic mad cow disease. Gem mad cow disease."

Pearl looks at her oddly. Before she gets to point out that gems don't get sick at all, Garnet walks out. That always works. "I'm just going to get myself cured," she says.

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Later in the evening, Garnet sulks back to the barn. Everyone's gone home (is that relief she feels?) She isn't sure what she's doing, her brain all muddled up over feelings and being used and forgiving and the vague feeling that if she hadn't taken over the team, there wouldn't be this tension between her and Pearl to begin with. The point of defeating Homeworld wasn't to replace one hierarchy with another.

(And of course, she never gets to talk to Pearl about things like this.)

(Of course, she's had long daydreams of just hashing it all out between them.)

This is why they don't fuse!

Garnet almost forgets to check if the ladder she's climbing up to the loft can support her weight. With a quick future vision check, she's assured that the wood hasn't rotted off the loft or ladder entirely.

 _Pearl,_ she thinks to herself, _we're both really dumb._

It doesn't change the fact that Garnet smiles every time Pearl smiles, having found something to be proud of in herself. By Homeworld standards Pearl was made to be pretty, but her unguarded grin was something entirely hers, not at all a standard-issue smile Pearls ought to dole out for their owners.

"Garnet?"

Pearl sits just under the barn's window.

"Yeah," she says, keeping it cool. She should have checked with her vision.

"Cured of mad cow yet?"

"Is that…" she pauses, "Is that a joke?"

Pearl puts a finger to her chin, thoughtfully. "I'd better fix my delivery."

"What are you doing here?"

"Thinking. There's too much noise in Steven's room. Peridot's temper tantrums, you know. They were trying to teach her how to play a boardgame."

Great. Pearl's beaten her to this place.

Garnet scans the future. She doesn't have enough data to visualize the Cluster, but each time she dips into the waters of the future, they run deep with possibility, murky threads of the negative sort. The past is behind them, and the future is one big mess. Right in front of her, the present slips from her fingers.

"It's fine, though," Pearl says, getting up. "I should probably go back and check on them."

Garnet stops looking at futures. This is it, the crossroads, the present, what's important, what counts. "Pearl," she says, touching her on the shoulder as gently as possible, "you can't avoid me forever." She can see Pearl trying to form a counterargument, any sort of denial.

"We've been working as smoothly as we've always been," Pearl replies.

Garnet doesn't have a heart, but the words cut anyway. "That isn't what I was hoping for when it came to us."

"You know we don't work in that way," Pearl replies dully.

"With you avoiding it all the time, yeah."

When Pearl doesn't say anything, Garnet continues. "This isn't what I meant when I said I wanted to trust you again."

"You know what they say about Pearls, you can't trust them as far as you can throw them."

Garnet closes the arm's length distance between them with a loose hug. "You need to stop saying things like that," she says into Pearl's hair.

"I thought you were checking up on my progress at first. It's a pretty awful thing to say, isn't it?" Pearl's hands are limp at her sides, voice slightly muffled through the hug.

"You've got that all wrong. Isn't this clear enough for you?"

 _Just stop dwelling in the past, already!_

"We're leaving soon," Garnet says, at the same time she tells her hands to behave and keep their place around Pearl's waist. "Even I can't tell what's going to happen. Are we just going to let this… stay the way it is?" On an impulse, she kisses Pearl's head. Her hands might have behaved but certainly not her lips.

 _Why can't we just… let go of the past and give **us** a try?_

Drawing away, Pearl's face is bright blue. Garnet's left not holding onto anything, and Pearl gives nothing away. She shakes her head as though it could remove the flush of color.

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 **Aftermath**

Pearl laughs out of nervousness. Out of all the things to talk about, it has to be about them. Oh, Pearl's thought it in the past, too often, and after running a few simulations of all the things that could go wrong, concluded it was easier to live in limbo than know for sure just how badly this could get. Garnet was fine on her own, made of love, and the whole point of keeping her distance is to keep the balance in the team and not ruin any other potential relationships, friendly or otherwise.

"I keep telling myself that I don't have to pass a test anymore," Pearl starts to pace around. "But it's an old habit, I guess. You know, a gem once asked me a question," Pearl says, "during the war. How is a Pearl capable of love when it isn't capable of sentience? We're incapable of love because we're conditioned to loyalty. Love isn't real if it's conditioned. So that gem doubted that I could feel anything real. She rather found my feelings funny and pointless."

"I don't doubt what you are."

"But you wonder if I latch onto you because I look to you for strength. And you were proven right, when we fused with Sardonyx."

Pearl speaks with a surgical coldness. She should be proud of herself.

"I didn't know myself," Pearl says, "if I loved out of conditioning or not. It wasn't something I wanted to think about. I just brushed it off. And when Rose Quartz told me that I was as real as anyone else, I told her with a flourish that of course I was, because I didn't want to think about the possibility that I wasn't."

Pearl looks at Garnet. "I eventually found the answer. And funnily enough it was you.

"You love yourself, Garnet. You're the answer to the question. When I first met you, I didn't realize it. It isn't just Pearls that are made for something. We're all made for something. Fusions are made for war. Peridots for fixing. Pearls are made to serve. We're all owned by something. You should have been like every fusion – single-mindedly made to fulfil a mission. But you weren't. Because you were aware of yourself and what made you – you. And you were glad… just to exist.

"My point is… sentience is a prerequisite to love. And sentience is the ability to love yourself. And…"

Pearl pauses, suddenly aware that she's gone on for too long about something she isn't sure she knows enough about. She turns, her face now blue with embarrassment rather than surprise. Garnet cocks an eyebrow. "I'm listening."

"You think this is silly."

"I'm being rejected, and you think I think this is silly?

Pearl blinks. Then she laughs. "I haven't said anything yet."

"When a gem takes this long to say anything, it means no."

Hanging on in this bizarre emotional limbo, swinging between nervous laughter and crushing heaviness, Pearl feels like she could fall with the slightest graze of the wind. She looks askance at the night landscape, unsure of what comes next.

"You were going to say something, weren't you?"

Her little lecture that she's been telling herself in her head for a while now sounds very silly when Garnet asks for it.

"Nevermind, Garnet."

"Finish what you were going to say! I don't want to hear your rejection just yet."

(How Garnet could be joking about the whole affair is one of the things Pearl likes about her.)

"Well. Everyone is born and raised with instructions from the outside. Like humans receive instruction from school or family about what their Authority is. We're born with the instinct of self-preservation, but that isn't love. We're just told who we should worship or serve and what our place is in the grand pyramid.

"We don't have a choice in most of the things in our life, but loving ourselves is the first conscious choice we can make. You can go mad wondering if everything you like is simply something conditioned in you, but for a Pearl like me, nobody ever gave me instructions to love myself. What was 'myself' to begin with if I was like every other Pearl that was made, anyway?"

Pearl blushes bright blue. She's gone on for so long on a subject she knows Garnet knows better than her. Why is she even doing this? Why's her whole body shaking, anyway? Wind down, wind down! She hears it in the voice of another gem, from another life, always telling her what to do and how to act.

"Ugh," she says. "It's hard to compress this kind of an abstraction! I'm not good at this. Sentience is a prerequisite to love," she repeats, trying to get back on track. "Sentience requires awareness, and the choice to love the self is an ideal test for independent thought because it requires conscious effort to believe in the value of youself. Pearls are not taught to value themselves. I – I don't think other gems are taught to do this, either. This equation also posits that… love that is unequal is not love at all. That's what I was trying to say."

There's a long pause after that. Pearl idly notices that the floor hasn't given way despite all her pacing.

"I guess at the end of it," Pearl says, much quieter now, "is that you've found yourself, and I haven't. Being involved with me would be an unfair burden to you."

She looks over to Garnet, who has gone from standing to sitting sometime during Pearl's lecture.

"This has got to be the strangest rejection in the world. Rejection by theory."

"A theory of sentience," Pearl says. "We can only be together if we're equals."

(As long as her mouth keeps spouting science, she'll be fine. But the truth is, she wants to cry. And laugh. Not in front of Garnet, not now, not yet.)

"And we're not equals," Garnet says.

"Not yet," Pearl amends. "I just don't think now is a good time."

"I should have kissed you," Garnet says.

"It wouldn't have fixed me."

"There's nothing to fix! You said it yourself that this isn't about passing a test. You don't have to be anything more than what you are. I can't be fine walking away from you with you thinking that – that you've gone this far and it still isn't enough."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Pearl says wryly. Her feet feel as though they're going to give, despite the fact that she should be fine, so she sits an arm's length away from Garnet, below the window of moonlight.

They're quiet for a while.

Pearl can hear bats outside, and the rustling of the grass.

She suspects that field mice have taken up residence in the barn. She hears one of them squeak, running through the rafters of the barn.

She looks around, at the walls with the paint coming off, at the lone moonbeam falling from the sky, narrowed into a square.

"You talk a lot about all this stuff," Garnet says. "But you never said anything about how you feel."

Pearl smiles in response to the twinge of pain she feels at holding back. "I never thought I'd agree with Greg on anything… but it _is_ torture."

"It's awful," Garnet agrees. "And we're doing this to each other."

"I'm sorry," Pearl says. "Just wait for me to catch up."

Garnet's hand is just next to hers. She can hold that, right? Even if they're not together?

"Other things might catch up to us before that."

"We'll make it through," Pearl says, deciding to lay her hand on Garnet's.

She's never ready for the jolts she feels when they touch. Her fingers wrap around Garnet's palm. With her free hand, Garnet taps out her visor. One red eye, one blue eye, and one violet eye all bore into her.

"Can you come closer?"

So they sit together in the dark, shoulders touching, Pearl's hand holding Garnet's. Pearl squeezes Garnet's hand tight, trying to tell her that she'd catch up as soon as she could.

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 _fin_

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Thanks for reading. Concrit and reviews always appreciated. Cheers y'all. Hope you're having a good day.


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